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First Do No (Temporal) Harm

Why Doc Brown Should Secretly Destroy the DeLorean

by Jimmy Alfonso Licon

If I could turn back time
If I could find a way
I’d take back those words that have hurt you
And you’d stay

— Cher

Introduction

The astonishing popularity of the Back to the Future franchise is likely explained partially by the involvement of time travel—an endlessly fascinating topic to people from various walks of life. Who doesn’t want to travel back in time to change the past for the better? Though there is no doubt about the imagined upsides of time travel, there are major downsides too. Imagine that someone traveled into the past to change the outcome of World War 2. The results could be catastrophic as Marty McFly discovered this when he nearly erased himself and his siblings from time by unwittingly interfering with the romance between his would-be parents.

The dangers and pitfalls of changing the past are recognized by Doc Brown in Back to the Future Part II upon discovering that Marty and Doc Browns’ timeline was altered for the worse (e.g., George McFly is murdered) by Biff using the time machine to change the past for his own gain. This event forced Doc Brown to realize that ‘time travel can be misused and why the time machine must be destroyed.’

The aim here is to explain why Doc Brown is right, even more than he knows. Luckily, though changing the past is possible in the fictional world of Back to the Future, it is logically impossible in the real world due to a temporal paradox[1] colloquially known as the grandfather paradox. That is the focus of the next section.

What is the Grandfather Paradox?

The grandfather paradox is an obstacle to anyone traveling back into the past to change it, even if they owned a fully operational time machine. Begin with a simple example. Suppose that Marty wants to kill his grandfather. He decides that his best chance to do so, undetected by other family members, would be to kill his grandfather in the past. After traveling back in time, Marty exits the time machine to find his teenage grandfather alone and vulnerable. Here we pause to ask a simple question: can Marty kill his grandfather? No. Despite the fact that Marty has a time machine, travelled back in time, and that his teenage grandfather is alone and susceptible to a sneak attack, Marty will fail. The explanation is what philosophers call the grandfather paradox. If Marty killed his grandfather, before he met Marty’s grandmother, then there never would have been an opportunity for his grandfather and grandmother to meet, fall in love, and have the children who would become Marty’s parents. In that scenario, Marty would never have existed, and so wouldn’t be able to kill anyone. As the philosopher, David Lewis, explains,

Tim cannot kill Grandfather. Grandfather lived, so to kill him would be to change the past. […] Either the events of 1921 timelessly do include Tim’s killing of Grandfather, or else they timelessly don’t. We may be tempted to speak of the “original” 1921 that lies in Tim’s personal past, many years before his birth, in which Grandfather lived; and of the “new” 1921 in which Tim now finds himself waiting in ambush to kill Grandfather. […] If Tim did not kill Grandfather in the “original” 1921, then if he does kill Grandfather in the “new” 1921, he must both kill and not kill Grandfather in 1921[2].

The point is that changing the past results in a contradiction, just like it would be contradictory to believe that it is raining and that it is not raining at the same time. Both claims cannot be true. Unfortunately for Marty, Doc Brown, and the unwitting residents of Hill Valley (under Biff’s reign), this same temporal logic doesn’t apply to the fictional world of Back to the Future, where changing the past looks possible. One such character, Biff, changes the past, to benefit himself, in Back to the Future Part II: once old Biff realizes that Doc Brown’s DeLorean is a time machine, he steals it and travels to the past with a copy of a sports almanac to help his younger self cheat at sports betting. Young Biff then uses the temporally displaced almanac to place winning bets on sporting events whose outcome he already knows.

In the actual world, old Biff would have been prevented from altering the past to his benefit by the logic of the grandfather paradox: older Biff travels back in time to give younger Biff a copy of a sports almanac from the future. Young Biff then places winning bets on sporting events using the almanac. As young Biff ages into older Biff, he realizes that he must travel back into the past to give young Biff a copy of the sport almanac without which young Biff wouldn’t know what sports team to bet on. Herein lies a dilemma: either young Biff lacks a copy of the sports almanac—thereby giving older Biff a reason to travel back into the past and to deliver it to his younger self – or he has a copy. On the first option, an explanation is lacking for how it is older Biff became rich using the sports almanac he doesn’t yet have. Either that, or, on the second option: young Biff already owns a copy of the temporally displaced sports almanac and used it to place bets that made older Biff rich. Here we still need to explain how younger Biff had a copy of the almanac before older Biff left the future to give it to him, because it originated from older Biff traveling back into the past from the future. Either option is results in temporal contradictions without hope of resolution.

As Biff altering the past and the sports almanac example illustrate: the ability to change the past could result in a temporal catastrophe. The next section elaborates.

A Temporal Can of Worms

In many ways, it is good that the grandfather paradox blocks us in the real world from changing the past. Why? Temporal change could easily be weaponized. The ability to radically alter the past would dwarf the destructive power of nuclear and biochemical weapons. Imagine that disgruntled Nazis, upon losing WWII, decided to build a time machine that would allow them to alter past events, especially the outcome of the war. Suppose that Ludwig traveled back in time—armed with information gained after the war—to warn the German high command of an invasion from the Allies such that the Germans could repel the attack, altering the outcome of the war. Such a machine would likely be the most powerful weapon known to humanity. There would be a strong temptation to use such a machine for evil.

Here it must be conceded that a time machine that allowed one to alter the past could be used for the good too. As an example, compare how George McFly and Biff interact at the start of Back to the Future, and their relationship at the end of the movie: at the start, Biff is George’s boss and regularly abuses, bullies, and takes advantage of him. George lacks the guts and courage to stand up for himself, and Biff lacks the fear and respect for George to treat him with dignity and decency; whereas, by the end of the movie, George is Biff’s boss, and that Biff treats the entire McFly family respectfully. This is an example where Marty altering the past improves the lives of the McFly family. It is accurate to say that the DeLorean has the power to change the past for the worse and for the better, and it could even be used to reverse bad changes to the past. If so, then, why should Doc Brown secretly destroy the DeLorean? We explain in the next section.

The Case for Destroying the DeLorean

If the DeLorean could be used to change the past, then it could be used to do so for the better or for the worse—in fact, both good and bad changes to the past happen in the first two Back to the Future movies. So, then, why does Doc Brown have a moral duty to secretly destroy the DeLorean. There are a couple reasons to dismantle it, despite the good that could be accomplished with it in the Back to the Future fictional universe.

The first reason is that doing good and doing bad are not morally equivalent. Consider that, like with medical doctors, we intuitively have a stronger moral duty to not harm others or make them worse off than we do to better their lives or benefit them. As moral philosophers, Gerald Harrison and Julian Tanner, explain,

[There is] an interesting asymmetry between preventing someone coming to harm, and benefiting someone. Intuitively, it is far more important to prevent causing and/or allowing harm to befall others than it is to positively benefit others[3].

Suppose that Doctor Jack only has time to perform one surgery despite two people needing an operation: Robert, who needs to have nasal passages expanded to make it easier to breathe, and Destiny, who is waiting on a facelift. Clearly, Doctor Jack has a stronger obligation to operate on Robert than to operate on Destiny for the simple reason that without surgery, Robert is likely to die of heart failure, a stroke, or something as bad. Intuitively, we have a greater moral duty to prevent causing or allowing harm to befall others, than we do to positively benefit others. And so, Jack has a stronger moral duty to Robert than he does to Destiny.

The same reasoning applies to the issue of what to do with the DeLorean: since it could just as easily be used to do good as to do evil, Doc Brown (and Marty, to a lesser degree) has a stronger moral duty to destroy the DeLorean such that it cannot be used to make people worse off than he does to allow it to exist to improve people’s lives. There are, of course, many avenues by which one could use the DeLorean to improve the lives of others, but allowing it to exist such that one could improve the lives of others by altering the past is to take a risk that someone could steal the DeLorean to do evil. So, because one could just as easily use the time machine to do good as they could to do evil, it follows from the asymmetry between the stronger duty to prevent causing harm and the weaker duty to positively benefit someone that one has a duty to destroy the DeLorean.

There is second reason that the DeLorean should be destroyed: even with the best of intentions, it is too easy to make a mistake that render the past (and the present and future) worse off than it would have otherwise been without intervention. To put the point differently: because one has a stronger duty to avoid causing or allowing harm to others than to positively benefit others, they should avoid interventions that are likely to cause harm to others, even when the intervention is done by someone with the best of intentions.

A scene from Star Trek: Voyager nicely illustrates this difficulty,

CHAKOTAY: Component 37329, a rogue comet. About eight months ago, Voyager made a course correction to avoid the comet. According to my calculations, it led to our entering Krenim space.

ANNORAX: The solution, then, would be to erase that comet from history.

CHAKOTAY: Exactly. Voyager would have stayed on its course and bypassed Krenim space altogether.

ANNORAX: Sounds simple enough. Conduct a simulation.

CHAKOTAY: Temporal incursion in progress. What happened?

ANNORAX: Had you actually eradicated that comet, all life within fifty light years would never have existed. Congratulations, you almost wiped out eight thousand civilizations.

CHAKOTAY: I didn’t consider the entire history of the comet.

ANNORAX: Four billion years ago, fragments from that comet impacted a planet. Hydrocarbons from those fragments gave rise to several species of plant life, which in turn sustained more complex organisms. Ultimately several space-faring civilizations evolved and colonized the entire sector.

CHAKOTAY: By erasing the comet I altered all evolution in this region.

ANNORAX: Past, present and future. They exist as one. They breathe together. You’re not the only person to make this mistake. When I first constructed this weapon ship, I turned it against our greatest enemy, the Rilnar. The result was miraculous. With the Rilnar gone from history, my people, in an instant, became powerful again. But there were problems. A rare disease broke out among our colonies. Within a year, fifty million were dead. I had failed to realize that the Rilnar had introduced a crucial antibody into the Krenim genome, and my weapon had eliminated that antibody as well.

CHAKOTAY: And you’ve been trying to undo that damage ever since. But each time you pull out a new thread, another one begins to unravel.

ANNORAX: You can’t imagine the burden of memory that I carry. Thousands of worlds, billions of lives, gone, brought back, gone again. I try to rationalize the loss. They’re not really being destroyed, because they never existed. Sometimes I can almost convince myself[4].

Clearly, Annorax has mixed intentions: restoring one’s people and culture looks like a noble goal, but not when at the expense of thousands of other civilizations. The point of the scene, though, is to illustrate that even with the best of intentions, changing the past for the better is a task too easy to get wrong. This is because the past is so interwoven with the present and the future through a complicated mix of causes and effects that is hard to predict and anticipate. This is partly because our knowledge of the world is socially distributed across individuals, communities, and events[5].

To illustrate just how socially interconnected our knowledge of the world is, consider a simple fact: you (as an individual) do not know how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich[6]. ‘Of course I do!’, you might object—but that objection misses the point. The claim here is not that one lacks the knowledge of how to assemble a sandwich comprised of bread, peanut butter, and jelly. Instead, the point is that in a more fundamental sense, you lack the knowledge needed to make the bread, peanut butter, and jelly. There are many ingredients needed to make the bread alone: one would need to know how to domesticate wheat, how to design and manufacture farm equipment to grow and harvest the wheat, and how to produce fertilizer. Just think about the many inputs required to produce the rubber that comprises the tires on the tractor needed to harvest wheat. And that is just some of the stuff one would need to know to make the bread, not to mention the other steps needed to produce the jelly and peanut butter. If something as simple as knowing how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is too complicated for any single individual, then changing the past for the better would be an ever more challenging task that, even with good intentions, one could easily make worse. Doc Brown is clearly brilliant, but changing the past for the better is likely beyond even his abilities. There are thus good reasons to destroy the DeLorean before it can be used for evil. But why should Doc Brown do so secretly, and remove any evidence of its existence? That is the topic of our final section.

Why Doc Brown Must Secretly Destroy the DeLorean

We established a case for Doc Brown having a moral obligation to destroy the DeLorean to prevent it falling into the wrong hands. However, there still remains the issue of why Doc Brown has an obligation to go about it secretly. Simply destroying the DeLorean, without removing evidence that a time machine exists, would seemingly be sufficient for Doc Brown to discharge his moral duty not to inflict on, or facilitate others inflicting harm, on innocent individuals, right?

Not quite. The issue here is that if Doc Brown destroys the DeLorean, but the evidence of its time traveling abilities remains, then such evidence is what engineers call a proof-of-concept: a working prototype that demonstrates the validity of the underlying theory. One might draw up plans for a new combustion engine, for example, but only find investors once one has built a prototype to show that the plans work in the real world.

Indeed, the Hill Valley Mall scene—early in Back to the Future—is itself an example of a proof-of-concept. Even though, by Doc Brown’s own admission, he invented the flux capacitor—the key component for time travel—decades prior, he wasn’t able to build a test model (aka a proof-of-concept) until the mall scene. Here is the salient exchange between Doc Brown and Marty,

DOC: He’s [Einstein the dog] fine, and he’s completely unaware that anything happened. As far as he’s concerned the trip was instantaneous. That’s why Einstein’s watch is exactly one minute behind mine. He skipped over that minute to instantly arrive at this moment in time. Come here, I’ll show you how it works. First, you turn the time circuits on. This readout tell you where you’re going, this one tells you where you are, this one tells you where you were. You input the destination time on this keypad. Say, you wanna see the signing of the declaration of independence, or witness the birth or Christ. Here’s a red-letter date in the history of science, November 5, 1955. Yes, of course, November 5, 1955.

MARTY: What, I don’t get what happened.

DOC: That was the day I invented time travel. I remember it vividly. I was standing on the edge of my toilet hanging a clock, the porcelain was wet, I slipped, hit my head on the edge of the sink. And when I came to I had a revelation, a picture, a picture in my head, a picture of this. This is what makes time travel possible. The flux capacitor[7].

At this juncture, one may wonder why evidence of a proof-of-concept should be destroyed, e.g. destroying the video tape that Marty and Doc Brown made at the Hill Valley Mall. The reason is simple: proof-of-concept is something that would increase the confidence of those to invest and explore time travel technology due to the demonstration by Doc Brown and Marty. And a boost in confidence, by bad individuals, in the ability of technology to allow one to travel to the past to change it would increase the likelihood that someone would spend the time and money to invent a time machine of their own. Of course, this could happen anyway—it would be hard to control technological innovations. However, allowing the DeLorean to exist potentially enables would be temporal wrongdoers. So, Doc Brown is right (more than he knows) to conclude that due to the potential for abuse, the DeLorean should be destroyed.

[1] Jimmy Alfonso Licon (2015). The Time Shuffling Machine and Metaphysical Fatalism. Think 14 (41): 57-68.

[2] David Lewis (1976). Paradoxes of Time Travel. American Philosophical Quarterly 13 (2): 145-152, p. 148.

[3] Gerald Harrison and Julia Tanner (2011). Better Not to Have Children. Think 10 (27): 113-121, p. 18.

[4] Star Trek: Voyager (1997). Year of Hell, Parts I & II (Season 4, Episodes 8 and 9).

[5] Fredrich A. Hayek (1945). The Use of Knowledge in Society. The American Economic Review 35 (4): 519-530.

[6] Leonard E. Read (1964). I, Pencil. In Leonard E. Read (author), Anything That’s Peaceful: The Case for the Free Market. Foundation for Economic Education, pg. 136-143.

[7] Back to the Future (1985). Universal Pictures.

~

Bio:

Jimmy Alfonso Licon is a philosophy professor at Arizona State University with research interests in ethics, AI, and political economy. He teaches classes like bioethics and philosophy of time, and wants his own time machine.

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Mercy INC.

Will you be among the 3% that succeed? By Anthony Lechner.

Mercy INC.

by Anthony Lechner

Training Manual

Level Omega: Dictators

Designed by Prince Apple

§1. Introduction

Congratulations on achieving the promotion to level Omega. Your 95%+ success rate on previous mercy conversions on the lower tiers has prepared you for the most difficult level.  You’ve dealt with powerful leaders in various industries, but now your focus is on the willpower of dictators. The average success rate for mercy conversions at this level is 3%.

§2. Scope of Position

There is nothing conventional about the morality of dictators. In your previous positions, you’ve had success with conventional moralities, such as consequentialism, deontology, contract theories, etc. At the level of Omega, you must think outside of the box to have a chance for mercy conversions. If conventional wisdom were to have worked at some point in the lives of dictators, then there would be no need for this department. Some methodology and techniques to add to your toolbox will be explained below, but a major component of your success will be the ability to move beyond your typical ethical theories. 

§3. Methodology/Teleology

Obligation, conformity, norms, standards, values, etc. have a place in society and the typical mercy conversions with which you have experienced success. Unlike the narcissist conversion, where you can use societal norms to massage the ego and influence the belief there is a personal reward (via ethical egoism), the dictator stands in complete opposition to the norms and values of society, with one exception. That is, the dictator demands blind loyalty to the standards, values, principles, etc. imposed by them on others. Imagine the self-regulated autonomy of Kant’s deontology without the function of reason guiding the human will. Your task here is similar. How would you convince Kant his principles of morality are ill-founded? But the catch is that you cannot use pure reason nor practical reason to do so. A successful mercy conversion at this level requires a radically unique approach that transcends any of the methods you have used in the past. In essence, your methods must somehow convince the dictator that mercy is their own idea—they must fully believe the principle is theirs. 

§4. Tools/Equipment

Wars—including assassinations and revolutions, social contracts—including negotiated boundaries, suicides, and love affairs have been used with some success. It is important to note, however, that these are not guarantees. They are, in fact, singular occurrences where a mercy conversion manifested. It is worth noting, too, that the cases of suicide have been debated by the tribunal. Additionally, the use of diseases has been recently forbidden by the tribunal as well. The primary reason for this is akin to the chemical warfare many of the dictators themselves use. We must make a difference between influencing the human will and simply preventing it from injuring other humans. 

Nocturnal sequences, such as dreams, have had some success as well. These are useful for singular mercy conversions; however, be careful not to overuse storylines or memories, as that can be misconstrued as mental health diseases, and it blurs the lines between strokes, schizophrenia, PTSD and genuine conversions. Sometimes the use of nightmares has ended up with a more brutal dictator than before them. When creating dream sequences, you must possess a touch of artistry—this can be a craft that takes cycles to develop. 

§5. System Cycles and Closures

Remember, we are in the business of mercy and not becoming dictators ourselves. Some conversions happen sooner than others. There is no universal timeline to follow here. The length of a cycle is at your discretion. Some Omega specialists have attempted—to the bitter end—to make a conversion. Others have swapped with willing specialists to build upon a collective consciousness. And still others have petitioned to return to Psi at the beginning of a cycle, in midcycle, or even at the end of a cycle. The tribunal respects your autonomy and decision-making regarding closures. 

Given this, we urge all Omega specialists to attempt several swaps in an effort to create collective consciousness. The tribunal believes this to be the most effective and efficient way to influence mercy conversions on a grand scale. While swaps are difficult to manage—especially having to realign with a variety of childhood experiences and moral theories—they can become quite useful when done with a quality group of specialists. The members of the tribunal wish you the best. If you are ever stuck or need assistance, we are here to help.

And keep in mind—the only way to earn a seat on the tribunal is to have more than one mercy conversion at the Omega level.

~

Bio:

Anthony Lechner is a special education teacher and philosophy instructor in Idaho, USA.

Philosophy Note:

This short piece is written as a fictional training manual for a type of entity that is in charge of convincing the human will (of dictators) to show mercy. Perhaps this entity is related to one’s conscience or maybe it is like Leibniz’s mysterious monad. The whole piece was inspired by the Grateful Dead song titled Fire on the Mountain. In it, there is a lyric that states, “If mercy’s a business, I wish it for you.”

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Hair Of The Dog

by James Machell

All I remember from high-school religious history was that people used to believe in a deity who created them to appreciate and acknowledge his love. The lesson resonated with me, because at the time, I was experimenting with some of the biomaterials my grandmother got for my birthday. She brought a dog last year, but no matter how long we spent in the park together, it showed no more affection than the occasional wag of its tail.

Dad warned me to be patient. The only way to bypass the years it took to build up genuine affection was to be the creature’s mother, which gave me an idea. Using this year’s present, I induced pluripotency in the cells of a loose hair, and used them to develop a new dog, but with my own genes in her DNA. The result was a pet like my old one, except for the ability to comprehend the privilege of being taken on walks by superior beings.

“Nice dreams?” I asked one morning, as she stirred from the foot of my bed.

The dog nodded enthusiastically, but was still a dog, and hadn’t the vocal cords, let alone the articulacy, to describe what she was dreaming about. I think it was Wittgenstein who said that if an animal could speak, we wouldn’t be able to understand it, and he must have been onto something, for when I showed my dog a diagram of the emotional spectrum, and asked her to tap on her feelings, she didn’t seem to know what I was talking about.

The dog simply was, every sensation blurring seamlessly together as if life was an event that happened all at once. I read somewhere that dogs even processed time differently to us, at a different speed or something. It made me think that if there really was a god, who existed outside the universe and within eternity, we wouldn’t be able to understand him either.

I named her Eve after the first woman, which I found especially poetic as the family dog was called Adam and she came from his side. It was strange to stare at myself in her eyes when they were so similar to mine. This distracted me from our board game, and I couldn’t help feeling humiliated when pushing pieces with her noise, she put me in checkmate.

The phone narrowly saved me from having to topple my king. It was the boy who sat next to me in science class. We spent our free periods in an art room where no one was around and he wanted to meet that afternoon. His love might not have been as abundant as that of my pet, who carried on nuzzling my leg as we spoke, but it was given for its own sake, rather than food and a place to sleep, which made it all the more special.

“Meet you at five!” I said, hanging up, having agreed to hang out at the mall.

I was so excited about our first rendezvous in public that I completely forgot my parents were out all day, leaving no one to mind our dogs. This wasn’t a problem for Adam, who kept quiet so long as he had food and water, but Eve wasn’t so simple. Intelligent enough to unlock doors, without the moral capacity to understand why it was wrong to chase cars or frighten the neighbour’s cat, she kept me prisoner whenever we had the house to ourselves.

My parents grounded me for a week the last time she got out, and since I was neither willing to cancel my date, nor go to the effort of padlocking the windows, I grabbed a bottle of pesticide from below the sink. Eve had some conception of death, having whimpered when my grandmother gave in to old age, but clearly none of her own. Though she grimaced at the taste, she kept on lapping, unable to conceive of it being anything other than medicine.

The first symptom of organophosphate poisoning was bewilderment. Her pupils dilated and she wandered around the house like dad after drinking beer. As later symptoms included vomiting and loss of bowel control, I covered the area around her basket with tissue paper and placed her in it to die. She snarled and gave up on life as I was putting on make-up, staring at me with her enormous dead eyes, as if to ask how I could have done this to her, but I didn’t feel bad, because I was a god now, and could resurrect her genes with another hair.

~

Bio:

James Machell is a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and the outreach manager for Utopia Science Fiction. He has interviewed several writers of speculative fiction, including P. Djèlí Clark, John Clute, and Samuel R. Delany. Find him on X @JamesRJMachell or YouTube where his channel’s name is Fell Purpose.

Philosophy Note:

This story deals with the incompatibility of ethics with logic. Just as Achilles can never overtake the tortoise in Zeno’s paradox of motion, no one can assess the value of life by its availability. Suggested reading: The theological works of G K Chesterton.

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Janus

by Sarah Hozumi

Death toll for two-way ‘plague’ bacteria reaches 2 billion globally

TOKYO (Newsway) – The World Health Organization has sounded the alarm in a damning report it issued on Monday over the newly discovered bacteria that many continue to inject into themselves even as the death toll reached 2 billion globally.

“Though many have reported ‘miraculous’ side-effects ranging from cured diseases to improved health, for the most part, people simply die after ingesting this bacteria,” the WHO said in the report.

Temporarily referred to as Yersinia pestis janus, the bacteria was first discovered at the beginning of this year in a RIKEN lab in Tokyo through what Prof. Manami Iguchi of Tokyo University – who was not part of the research – calls “a fateful accident.”

“I don’t think most of the world is going to thank them for this discovery, though,” she said.

Yersinia pestis is a strain of bacteria known for causing plagues, most famously the bubonic plague in the 1300s.

Five researchers in the lab – Takeshi Yamamoto, Toshi Shiota, Michiko Suzuki, Miwa Matsunaga and Rina Satou – were exposed to the bacteria on Jan. 11 of this year.

On Feb. 12, Shiota, Matsunaga and Satou all showed signs of what a RIKEN report described as “improved health.”

Shiota, an avid swimmer, found herself able to hold her breath underwater for increasing lengths of time, a source who asked not to be identified said.

An injury Matsunaga sustained to her left knee disappeared over the course of a month, the source said.

Satou’s eyesight improved so much, she no longer needed glasses, the source added.

Yamamoto and Suzuki were hospitalized shortly following their exposure to the bacteria, where their condition swiftly deteriorated. They both died of multiple organ failure on Feb. 15.

“That is where someone should have paused all of this and really reflected on whether or not this discovery is really good for humanity as a whole,” Iguchi said.

“Unfortunately, no one did.”

#

‘Godlike’

News of three researchers gaining what Dr. Robert Carroll at the Johns Hopkins Hospital called “godlike improvements to their physiques” went viral across most social media platforms within a week of the discovery.

The three remaining researchers were able to re-create, then replicate the bacteria, and in late February – and with the surprisingly swift approval of the Japanese government – RIKEN began offering it to hospitals in the Tokyo area as a “last-resort” option for patients with severe illnesses.

A total of 5,400 patients were given the bacteria. Of them, 2,400 died while 3,000 showed nearly complete recoveries from what would have otherwise been fatal injuries or illnesses.

“To be honest, no one has any idea what’s going on here,” Carroll said. “If I were to venture a guess, I’d say the bacteria will either kill you or completely cure you based on how it reacts to the environments inside your body. My money would be on the bacteria already living inside of your body playing a starring role in deciding.”

While many governments across the globe called for greater scrutiny and more testing to determine how to better skew the bacteria in humanity’s favor, public demand for access to the bacteria was so deafening, it became available in most developed countries as a prescription by mid-May.

By June, the WHO reported over 30 million people had died after ingesting the bacteria.

#

A ‘blessing’

Meanwhile, the internet became flooded with success stories of those who injected themselves with the bacteria and obtained some sort of unique improvement to their bodies – from eating more food and never gaining a pound to never needing to sleep.

One such benefactor is a social media influencer based in London who goes by the screen name Madame Camasene. She has 4 million subscribers on her video-sharing platform.

“As soon as I heard about this thing, I knew I had to live-stream trying it,” Madame Camasene said in an exclusive interview with Newsway.

Her live-stream of injecting herself on June 14, then the first 24 hours following, currently has 500 million views.

“It’s amazing what it’s done for me,” the influencer said. “The doctors say it did something to my vocal cords, but I can change my voice however I want.”

She has used that to do spot-on impressions of famous celebrities, with each video viewed over 2 million times.

“This bacteria has been a blessing,” she said.

#

‘Was it worth it?’

An American father of three who lost two of them to the bacteria doesn’t see it that way.

“I wish I could go back in time and tell those Tokyo researchers to keep their findings to themselves,” Michael Pall of Falls Church, Va., said.

His three teenage children – Alex (17), Brandon (16) and Taylor (14) – found out about the bacteria online on around June 15, Pall said.

“Alex already had pretty bad sleep apnea, and Brandon had surgery on his elbow after a car accident three years ago. Taylor has pretty bad asthma and anxiety attacks.”

Thus, he decided to consult with their family doctor.

“There wasn’t even any hesitation – like she was prescribing pills for a headache or something,” Pall said.

Two days after their injections, Alex and Brandon developed severe respiratory symptoms.

“The ER didn’t even have room, so we were sent home.”

Alex and Brandon died the following day.

Taylor, meanwhile, says her asthma is gone but the anxiety has only grown worse.

“And she feels like she’s responsible for killing her older brothers because she was the one who told them about it,” Pall said.

Pall is seeking legal action against his family doctor, but considering the sheer volume of lawsuits in the U.S. against doctors from bereaved family members such as Pall, he’s not hopeful anything will come of it.

“You have to ask yourself, was it worth it?”

#

‘Mother Nature’s Russian roulette’

The bacteria has already shown signs of mutating, with researchers around the world struggling to keep up.

“There’s just too many people ingesting the bacteria,” Carroll said. “I can’t begin to tell you what the future of it is, whether it’ll get better at healing us or better at killing us, but considering the fatality rate, I think we should brace ourselves.”

The WHO has issued a strong warning that anyone considering injecting themselves with the bacteria should only do so as a last resort.

“Until further research has been done, we must consider this bacteria to be dangerous,” the report said.

World leaders are planning on holding an emergency summit on the bacteria in September in New York City, where they are considering new global regulations.

“That’s like trying to shove all the evil in the world back into Pandora’s box,” Iguchi said. “But we’re too late; the box has been opened.”

The WHO predicts the death toll could rise to 3 billion by the end of the year.

Carroll said, “This bacteria has become Mother Nature’s Russian roulette, and we’re mostly losing.”

~

Bio:

Sarah Hozumi is an editor who has lived near Tokyo for about 15 years. Along with having a fantastic time learning Japanese, she loves photography and gardening. To see short stories she’s had published, and to read her blog mostly about all things Japan, visit sarahhozumi.com.

Philosophy Note:

I was inspired to write this while wondering at what “the greater good” could be in a case like this. If humanity did stumble across some sort of tool like this that cures more than it kills but does indeed kill, would we still use it? I also understand more and more the sinister nature of social media glossing over the more complex aspects of life, and how that might be used in a case like this. The pretend news article I’ve written makes me wonder where we might draw the line, in reality, if such circumstances ever occurred – if we even do draw a line.

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For The Sake Of The Mission

by Andreas Flögel

Jorgens and Krem patrolled the hydroponic area of the generation-spaceship Mighty Endeavour. No critter sightings were known in this region of the ship. It seemed that these creatures were not interested in plants or human food, but solely in humans.
Jorgens was animated as he shared the events of the previous night. He had hoped to catch the attention of Ensign Carmen Gomez but failed utterly. Krem chuckled, thinking that Gomez could do way better than hooking up with Jorgens. 

Something hit Jorgens in the shoulder, jerking him around, his assault rifle slamming to the ground and sliding across the floor.

Krem ducked behind a crate. Critters! A flash at the end of the corridor told him the location of the alien. He fired a shot but wasn’t fast enough.

 “Bollocks! Are you okay, Jorgens?”

“More or less, Sergeant. The arm feels paralyzed.”

Krem concentrated on the far side of the corridor, hoping for another shot. Good thing they were in an area where the use of kinetic weapons was okay. No shootings in the red zones, e.g., in the engine rooms or near the hull of the ship. But this corridor was green all over. So Krem would kill this pest with all the firepower he had. 

It started two or three generations ago. Some alien life form entered the ship. No one had the slightest idea how they achieved this or even what they wanted.

They ambushed people who were alone or in small groups. Attacked them by shooting pointy bolts made of ordinary steel or even killing their victims by stabbing them with their long, spidery legs. They did not differentiate. Military personnel or civilians, adults or children. All could fall prey to them.

Those critters looked like dog-sized robo-spiders and their bodies consisted of metal and electrical circuits. Nevertheless, one could stop them, best with a well-aimed shot. Whenever you killed one of them it immediately started dissolving, leaving no corps but only some metallic ash. Everyone on the ship got told to keep their distance from the remains. Those were said to be toxic.

In addition to regular patrols, the military command ordered the formation of search teams tasked with locating the hideouts or nests of the critters. However, the aliens proved to be incredibly elusive. The searches did not achieve any significant breakthroughs or successful discoveries.

Waiting, rifle at the ready, Krem heard Jorgens radioing HQ. They wanted to send reinforcements.

Krem shook his head.

“Everything is under control. We’ll let you know if we need support.” 

Krem knew that they were glorified janitors on this ship, not real soldiers. No need for any combat at least until landfall when they had to secure the settlers and their settlements. But that was centuries away. Critter hunting was the only action they would see before they were dust. And Krem would not let this chance get taken away from him by a group of grunts, all as eager to score as he himself.

The beast came out of hiding for a moment to send a bolt in Krem’s direction. But the soldier was ready and caught the critter full on. Bullseye!

The dissolving of the alien was quite a spectacle. Krem would not miss it. Something wrapped around the critter’s body. It lit up, then disintegrated into smaller parts, which also fell apart. In the end, only a pile of brown ash and some smoke remained. 

“Hey, Jorgens. Got it! Did you see?”

Krem turned to his buddy and was shocked to see a second critter attacking from the other side. It fired several bolts in Krem’s direction as it charged toward Jorgens, who, unaware of the attack, looked for his rifle.

Krem shouted a warning and ducked away.  

Jorgens jumped, but the critter stabbed him with one of its legs. Krem fired several shots.

Jorgens broke down over the critter, pressing it to the ground with his body when the dissolving started. An awful smell of burnt flesh filled the room, accompanied by Jorgens’ screams.

After a short time, everything was over. Only silence and the smell remained. Jorgens lay motionless on his front. Krem rolled him onto his back. The big hole with the charred edge in his friend’s torso was not the only thing that made his bile rise. 

#

“I brought you a gift, Major.”

Krem’s throat hurt, but he ignored it. He slapped the thing on Major Belkin’s desk. The officer didn’t even look at it.

Krem’s anger grew.

“That’s not alien! It consists of the same electric parts we are using.”

The Major let out a sigh.

“I assume, Corporal Jorgens body was in contact with the critter when it dissolved, Sergeant?”

He did not wait for an answer.

“So many years, and they still haven’t found a solution to this problem. The disintegration process is a masterpiece of engineering but contact with a large organic object causes it to fail.” 

Krem was shocked.

“You’re not even trying to deny it, Major? You know the critters are built by humans … by us? But why?”

“This ship’s too damn safe, Sergeant. That’s the problem,” the major growled. “Folks get complacent with nothing to threaten them generation after generation. Accidents and cabin fever don’t cut it. Without real threats nipping at their heels every damn day, people are no longer fit for a destination, where we do not know what awaits us. Carelessness could get us killed and destroy our mission.” 

Krem felt dizzy.

“We are not careless!” he said through gritted teeth.

The major laughed drily. “If your mind had been on the patrol, would those critters have gotten the jump on you?”

Krem clenched his fists but said nothing.

“And if you hadn’t waved off backup, maybe young Jorgens would still be breathing.” The major blew a smoke ring. “But I guess you wanted all the glory for yourself.”

“But people got killed. Soldiers, civilians, even children.”

Krem gasped for air, felt he could not breathe.

“The critters are needed as enemies, to keep everyone alarmed. This incident, the knowledge that two of our soldiers died from a critter attack helps with that.”

“Two? But I am alive. And don’t try to kill me to cover up your doings. People have seen me after the attack.”

“Try killing you, Sergeant? But you already did that yourself. You were warned to keep your distance from the critter-remains. The poison is already in your body. As I said, careless.”  

Krem slumped down, his eyes becoming glassy. It wasn’t clear whether he still heard the Major’s words.

“Hopefully this will keep others away from undissolved critter-parts, for a while at least. Thank you for your service, Sergeant. Your death is a valued contribution to our mission.”

~

Bio:

Andreas Flögel is a German author with a passion for exploring multiple literary genres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, and fairy tales. His fiction has been published in anthologies and magazines in both German and English. Recent credits include stories in Dark Moments, Flashpoint SF, Trembling with Fear, Stygian Lepus, and various anthology collections. For additional information see his website: www.dr-dings.de.

Philosophy Note:

The idea of a generation ship has always fascinated me. But living in such a secure environment for generations raises questions—will the inhabitants become complacent over time and unfit for the challenges of colonising an unknown world? My story explores philosophical issues including:

  • Can immoral acts be justified for the “greater good”?
  • Is it ethical to deceive people and endanger them without consent?
  • How much freedom should individuals surrender to ensure a society’s long-term survival?

Rather than provide answers, I want to stimulate reflection on these timely questions relevant to our world today.

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Mirror

What it reflects can no longer be unseen, by Philip Madden.

Committed

by Matthew Ross

The symphony starts, not with the sound you might expect but rather an empty note in the frosty dark before things begin. There in the space of night hanging above a rare gem, an interruption. A brilliant flash and now the orchestra has arrived.

It’s long, many kilometers so. A tube made from metal and plastic. As soon as it arrives, the instruments begin. A baton taping on a lectern for a dozen lifetimes finally calls the first section to life. A swarm of probes detaches and alights, singing their quiet songs about all they see and hear. They find not the expected four but rather five orbs of rock and two more made from gas, they take temperatures from their core and from the blazing star at the center. Gravity, composition, trajectory; reams of data flowing back to the ship like so many baseballs aimed for waiting mits. All of it is stored for future perusal.

Now tuned, the song may begin in earnest. The subject has been found, hanging just two places from the star, a world made from iron, silicon, aluminum, and then everything else save for free oxygen. The tube uncouples and becomes four large discs. Each a note in a measure which finds just the right spot on the surface upon which to plunge, an anxious percussion.

To be on that world would be terrifying, tectonics responding to heavenly bodies that rap just forcefully enough to split the skin of this fruit to reveal molten nutrition and warmth from the inside.

In each disc a whole orchestra of its own hums to life. Heavy rods plunge into pools of water becoming steam that turns wheels and makes electricity which brings a thousand inanimate bodies to life. Pistons fire and joints turn and all the while in the background, information. Information. Information. What is where? Water and salt, stone and soil, underscored by that one melody everyone is searching for and hoping not to find.

Relentless, each ship releases an army of small drones, each with a cadre of miniature versions of itself. They fly in every direction, talking to their parents, and then their aunts and uncles; siblings and cousins. Information flows about mountains, seas, valleys, clouds, rivers, and storms, where they came from, and their trajectories in the coming days and weeks and years, and millennia.

Absent that one note, the song continues. Thump, thump, thump, oxygen arrives, and the color green is born, spreading out across the rocks and dirt, staking into every surface to erect a tent of oxygen for what’s to come. Once the sandblasted plains have turned from brown to green the tiny drones tell the large drones to relay to the ships to distribute their parcels.    It takes hours for each parcel to be carried to the outside of the ship. When it has arrived, it opens and a dozen coffins slide out gently. Each one is precious and is deposited on the ground with careful but mindless reverence. They are identical with a dozen hoses, a heater, and reservoirs of water and power.

The planet has rotated a hundred times or so before each parcel–womb splits wide. Inevitably, there are losses with so delicate a cargo. Black ichor spills out as confused, wiry frames scrabble for help that isn’t there. Anything that has gone wrong before now was simply steel, ones and zeros. These instruments, though, had been imbued with a special standing by those that made the tube and each one lost was a dirge within the medley.

Of those that remain, there was no black ichor but heady red fluid, complex and tangy, like nothing ever seen the world over. Set free from the sack in which they were sewn, the occupants walk out beneath a purple and black sky, holding delicate instruments aloft.

There is a soft but urgent tone.

“What is that?” says one to the other.

“Something they missed,” answers their counterpart.

The handheld instruments beeped and wheedled and offered a new view, something that no mind of ones and zeroes could have reported.

The melody. A sealed bag of protein, contents swishing as it made its way along; pseudopods feeling their way to another meal, a lonely instrument looking for its section.

“God dammit,” the first one sighs.

And just like that, the symphony stopped, there were no late percussionists, no lackadaisical brass, nor primadonna woodwind. A hundred thousand instruments all working together in a chorus and with the sideways stroke of a single angry maestro all sound is cut and the world over metal shapes, drones, and ships plummet to the ground, coolant spread over fissionable things until they are too cold to run, rendering engines and computers as quiet as the grave.

Somewhere across the vast night sky, the audience listens to the too-short symphony and with a roll of the eyes they thwack away amelodic on a tuneless board and with a click proclaim to all: LIFE DETECTED, OPERATION ABORTED.

~

Bio:

Matt Ross graduated from IU with a bachelor’s in English creative writing in 2008. He went on to earn an MA in TESOL in 2017. Now, after a brief time in Rwanda with the Peace Corps., he works as a junior high school, high school, and university English teacher and researcher in Japan. His creative publications include “The Tharsis Dilemma” in Titanic Terastructures by Jay Henge publishing and “Ashes to Ashes” in Haunt by Dragon Soul Press.

Philosophy Note:

My philosophy? Well, with sci-fi it’s usually some version of first contact. Reaching out into the great unknown and dealing with what’s found there is my primary area of interest with the genre. I tend to start with an idea and run with it until I feel I’ve wrung the story out of it, then leave it alone for a while and come back to it. My hope is that something grows. I like writing my stories when I’m not sure who will win or what will happen, sometimes it’s tragic but that’s what makes a story real for me no matter the genre, characters, or anything else.

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Beyond The Sea

The urge to set out and explore the unknown may not be limited to vertebrates... By Kevin Eric Paul.

Mirror

What it reflects can no longer be unseen, by Philip Madden.

The Gehenna Of Saint Augustine

by Joachim Glage

“The better a thing the worse its ruin,” Augustine said, but tenderly, to Porphyro, his last pupil. “Angels and men, when they fall, become more wretched than monsters.”

When Saint Augustine spoke these words he had less than an hour left to live. At the time—the year was 430, Visigoths and Burgundians hounded the empire on various fronts, and Vandals laid siege to Hippo—he was still but Aurelius Augustinus, not yet a saint; but his voice, though rattling from illness, sounded nobly in the still-proud Latin of Rome, and projected the special authority he’d gained during his life, as if his vocation (as bishop, as a statesman of Roman Africa) would not yet relinquish him, and as if he were somewhat more than a man dying.

Lifting his arms from his sides—he lay in his bed, almost still—and raising his cold fingers to lend emphasis to the words, he said to Porphyro: “Our natural goodness is a gift from God. There can be no worse evil than to squander it.”

The church was quiet. Porphyro looked about Augustine’s chambers and saw that psalms had been hung from the walls. Augustine, with a hand half-palsied, reached out and clenched Porphyro’s wrist.

In that moment, nearly a thousand years still stood between Augustine and his sainthood. Neither he nor Porphyro, of course, could have any inkling about that. Nevertheless the student swore that he could feel his teacher’s soul radiating all about him, and he knew that it had been specially touched by God, and his eyes filled up with tears.

At this, Augustine paused, suddenly aware of the shortness of his time. It may surprise you, my good and generous reader, but the man who wrote City of God and the Confessions,and who had long warned congregations in Hippo and Carthage of the corruptible body, had not given much thought to the subject of his own bodily demise. (It should be granted, at any rate, that the strictly physical fact of death, at least as a theological matter, could be of only minor interest to someone like Augustine.) What strange new thoughts now came to him?

One need not be a varlet to know the knight’s armor clatters before a campaign; likewise, one needs no special wisdom to predict that a man of old age—even one as notable and pious as Augustine—will, when harried by death, feel consternation about it. It is one thing to talk about dying, or about long eternities; it is quite another when rot creeps upon you. When Augustine looked up at weeping Porphyro, and felt his own heart quicken, he knew, for the first time and truly, that he was going to die.

“I’ve written a book that I’ve kept secret,” Augustine said abruptly. Porphyro wiped his eyes. “I’ll tell you where I’ve hidden the manuscript. You must promise me you will find it and destroy it, and not show it to anyone.”

Porphyro was taken aback, but nodded.

“You must promise me that you will not read the book, either, but will destroy it at once.”

Augustine’s student looked pained. Eventually he said: “My teacher, I fear my interest in your book will be too great. Perhaps if you tell me its contents, my curiosity will be diminished, and I will be able to destroy it without reading it.”

Augustine lay silent and still and with his hands clasped for a long time. At last he spoke:

“It was not long ago. I had recently finished writing Book XXI of City of God, where, among other things, I attempted to deduce the qualities of hell. As you well know, I wrote in that book that hell is a place of fire, and that the souls consigned to that domain have bodies which suffer burning. I wrote that these bodies do not perish in the flames, but are doomed to suffer them forever. I theorized, too, that any repentance in hell is fruitless, not only because the source of such penitence would be pain as opposed to goodness, but also because the evangelium proclaims it to be so: their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.”

Augustine paused, coughed, and then adjusted himself in his bed.

“At that time, just as I was about to begin work on Book XXII, a man came to visit me. I knew straightaway that this man was an unnatural being, for he appeared in the exact form of my old acquaintance, Faustus from Mileve, whom I knew to be long dead. The man said to me, ‘I came to speak with you about hell,’ and then he grinned, and I knew it was the devil.”

Augustine fell silent for a moment. Porphyro raised up slowly in his chair, and barely breathed.

Augustine continued: “Very well do I know of the devil’s forked tongue, and how he uses flattery, and enjoys the fruits of his manipulations; so I paid him no mind when he told me he was a great admirer of my work. I ignored him, again, when he complimented me for the good I’d done for Rome and the world. Finally, he said to me: ‘When it comes to the subject of hell, however, you’re simply off the mark. May I offer you a glimpse?’ He then took my hand and kissed it. And then, without ceremony, he left.”

Augustine adjusted himself again, and took a moment to rub his eyes.

“That night I had a dream, a dream that was more than a dream. It was a vision. A vision of hell. The hell that I saw, however—or rather, that I now found myself in—was not a place of fire, but of water. ‘The water of knowledge,’ a voice whispered to me. ‘It encompasses everything.’ It was as if I’d been sent to the bottom of the sea, only, it was not dark; the water was limpid and bright, and it functioned somewhat like the sun, making all things visible. Moreover, I found that I could move through the water with ease, and I walked about on the ground normally. Nothing floated or swam. And yet I could feel the water at every moment. It moved over me, and its vibrations were like something alive.

“This hell that I saw, the landscape of it, was much like our own world, with creatures and plant-life and mountains and stones and plains; indeed the whole of beautiful nature was there. Nearby me stood a tree; I approached it. At that moment I understood how the ‘water of knowledge’ had earned its name. For what flashed upon me, from many of the water’s vibrations, was not just the sight of the tree in its current state, but in every stage of its existence. I saw it through the seasons, and as a seedling, and then as an acorn; I saw the changing life of the soil which nourished its roots, and the spread of the tree’s ancestors in distant woods; I saw the flattening of mountains to make room for it, and before that the receding of ice, and fire and explosions that were terrifying to behold—all things that took place over eons, and seemingly for the sole purpose that I might now gaze at these simple branches.

“Just then a voice spoke from behind me: ‘The water shows you everything.’ I spun on my heels and saw that it was Faustus of Mileve once more. Whether this was the real Faustus, or the devil again, I could not say. He continued: ‘The water makes sure that we see the absurdity of God’s generosity wherever we look.’ And then he smiled at me, and it was just the way he would smile many years ago, when we discussed theology.

“Without ado, he cheerfully began to criticize what I’d written in City of God. ‘Your first mistake,’ he said, ‘was assuming the primary substance of hell should be fire. The very lightest of elements!’ Faustus laughed, and I could not help but laugh too. ‘Even the simplest of principles,’ he continued, ‘ought to have suggested to you the opposite: that here, in this lowest place, the heavier elements, earth and water, should predominate.’ Again I was moved to laugh. He went on: ‘Your second error was conceiving of hell under that most human of ideas, that of retribution, as if hell were but a dungeon for the paying up of debts. But no, there is no paying of debts here. In truth, if there is a single axiom of this place, it is that: No debt is ever paid. Even to try is foolishness.’

“I then asked Faustus if hell was not a place of punishment after all. His answer astonished me. ‘But it’s all there in Genesis already,’ he said. ‘Knowledge is a kind of punishment, and perfect knowledge is perfect punishment.’ He paused to allow my confusion to settle somewhat. ‘It is just the same as with riches: the more you’re lavished with knowledge the more fruitless the abundance becomes.’ He smiled at my perplexity. ‘Just as there are solitudes that are accessible only in crowded cities, so does a general blur become possible when everything is thrown into relief equally. Where everything is luminous nothing is. It is not only in the dark of night that all cows are black, as the saying goes, but in the bright and full day, too. Or as we sometimes put it in one of our proverbs, There is more nothingness in a clod of dirt than in the empty air, and even the buzzing richness of nature only talks over itself. Call it the nothing of plenitude. There’s just so, so much. It humiliates you. It reduces you and even itself to naught.’

“We both laughed. I don’t know why we laughed so much. There was something preposterous about it all. And then Faustus suddenly cried out: ‘Oh you charmed creatures still on the earth! If only you knew how much passes right through you! If only you knew how faintly you exist! Here in hell we are dense, we collide with everything.’ Faustus’s smile then faded, and he said: ‘In hell it is evident that nothing we could ever do, even given infinite lifetimes, could earn the abundance bestowed on us. Even gratitude feels like foolishness. Nay, more than that. Gratitude is impossible here. We have too much.’

“We continued talking for some time. Faustus recited for me some more of hell’s proverbs, and he told me what society was like there, and he showed me a dark molten sea where people sometimes boiled themselves, if they burned with too much guilt (somehow they found this soothing). We discussed more theological concerns, too, such as whether one can sin in hell, or pray, or repent, and how vast a place it is, and what manner of demon resides there, and if hell be eternal or not, and how much the damned can recall from their lives on the earth, and so forth.

“When I awoke from this vision, I immediately set about to writing it all down. This labor took three days. On the fourth day I rested, but fitfully. On the fifth day I resolved to keep what I’d written secret. I reasoned as follows: Either my vision was a lie, or, if it contained some part of the truth, it was nonetheless that part that the devil was desirous for us to know. Either way, I figured, it must be suppressed. Why I did not destroy the text myself in that very moment, I cannot say. Pride, perhaps, or doubt. Sin, in either case!”

Augustine then told trembling Porphyro how to find the manuscript, and admonished him one last time not to read it, and then waved him away. Later that day Augustine lay dead, while Porphyro stole into a hidden recess underneath the baptistry. He found his way down a dark stair and through a low-arched hall, as instructed, and then moved aside the third stone to the left from a sign of the cross that had been carved on the wall. The only copy of De Gehenna lay revealed. He took the text into his hands. “I have a home for you,” he said, “in a library in a low place;” and then he fled away through the secret door, and over the mosaics set so carefully in the floors of the basilica.

~

Bio:

Joachim Glage lives and writes in Colorado, where he also enjoys no longer being an attorney. The Devil’s Library, a collection of Glage’s fiction about imaginary and fabulous books, is forthcoming from Jackleg Press.

Philosophy Note:

The questions–rooted in what I call “imaginative theology”–that spurred the creation of this text were: What if Hell were the opposite of the abyss? What if Hell were precisely the absence of mystery? What if Hell meant the destruction of the possibility of gratitude, not through deprivation, but through abundance?

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Angel

by Nicholas Diehl

On the day Beth became an angel, the doctor put a laser in her index finger and a bomb in the back of her skull.

            “Will it hurt?” she asked. She hadn’t thought to ask before, during the interview.

            “Hmm? Oh, you mean the bomb? Oh, no, no, of course not.” The doctor sounded distant, probably distracted with the delicate work he was doing on her hand. “It’s not really a bomb like you would think. When the laser fires, the membrane of the bomb ruptures, the chemicals inside get released, and you go to sleep. The whole thing happens in about five seconds.”

            Beth nodded, but the doctor was focused on the neurocircuitry again and didn’t give anything more than one-word answers the rest of the afternoon.

            When he was finished, though, he leaned back and smiled a weary, compassionate smile. “It is finished, Elizabeth. Go with God.”

            But the tall man waiting for her in the corridor was dressed entirely in black, save for a red Roman collar like a slash at the throat.

#

            Beth liked Brother Dominic; he had a severe mouth and gentle eyes. He reminded her of Father Dev, one of the priests who had taught her at primary school, even though Father Dev was Indian and barely taller than some of the Year 6 boys. It was the mouth and the eyes.

            Brother Dominic took her arm gently—her left arm—and walked with Beth, through the hospital and out into the parking lot. The nurse had wanted to put her in a wheelchair, bless her heart. Brother Dominic had run her off.

            Beth might be dying of cancer, but she wasn’t an invalid.

            He helped her into a sedan, a car so vanishingly black that Beth could imagine the order wanted it to pass unnoticed.

            But she remembered then that the number plate was a vanity: GLADIUM.

#

            “The fool sees contradiction in perfection, and so is blind to the greatness of God. For (so says the fool) justice is a virtue and mercy is a virtue, and how can a man be perfect in his justice and also perfect in his mercy? But God has not these limits….

            “The destroying angel has ever been the hand of God’s justice and of God’s mercy. The angel is summoned by the sins of one accursed, one who has fallen so far from the glory of God that he is trapped in immorality as like in quicksand. Thus is the angel justly summoned, by the sins of the accursed, and thus the angel brings death upon him in mercy, that his fall from God’s presence be halted and his redemption in the hereafter may commence….”

            (St. William of Salisbury, De iustitia Dei)

#

            Dominic drove and spoke very little; like Beth, he had an appreciation for the sparser landscapes of language. Beth watched the slower traffic slide around them for a while and let her mind drift. The painkillers they had given her helped with that.

            A month ago Beth had woken up in the morning, and she had been dying and didn’t know it. In the afternoon she met with the specialist, and he told her that the cancer had progressed.

            “I’m sorry, Beth. There is nothing more our medicine can do.”

            She had to lick her lips, the roof of her mouth, before speaking. She tasted ashes—she was reminded that she was ashes. “How long?”

            “Perhaps…” Nervous, the doctor licked his lips too. “Perhaps six months.”

            She nodded. She nodded again as the doctor explained options for home care and hospice, nodded because she was too exhausted to do anything more in the moment when her life was given an end.

            Eventually the doctor left and Beth found the energy to leave as well. And there, in the too bright light of the lobby was a man with a close black beard and solemn eyes in his skull.

            “I have the advantage, Mrs. Reeves. I am Brother Dominic. But you have heard of the Gladium Angeli, of course.”

#

            “…. John’s break from the Church in Rome was the design of William of Salisbury, a soldier who went to the Holy Land in the Third Crusade, grew disgusted with the viciousness and venality in his fellow Christians, and returned to found the Gladium Angeli, a holy order devoted to bringing justice in the name of the destroying angel of God. The Swords of the Angel were quickly disavowed by Rome, but were embraced by John, who saw them as an ally against an otherwise unremarkable uprising of barons in 1215.…”

            (T.L. Kedzie, A Brief History of the Anglican Church)

#

            Now they sat in a comfortable room, tea steaming on the table between them. Brother Dominic smiled as faintly as the memory of sand. Beth’s finger itched where the thin scar was already starting to fade. The binder in her lap contained the profiles of ungodly potentates. It felt heavy with sin.

            She turned the pages of evidence with her fingertips, as though their taint might crawl onto her skin if she were not careful. A tycoon who had made millions by manipulating the prices of life-saving drugs. Here, a preacher who had solicited money to build a church for God only so that he might build a mansion for himself. This one, an heiress who bribed away regulations and then collected insurance when her employees died in the mines.

            Brother Dominic cleared his throat and templed his fingers. “These are individuals who have … fallen far from God’s presence. They have been tried in the Church’s own courts and found guilty of crimes against God and humanity.”

            Beth nodded. A man who used his wealth to buy the bodies of children. She tapped the picture with her index finger.

            “This one.”

#

            “…from such an opening, a great transformation in English law was birthed. For what is law may be divided into two parts, that part which deals with such offenses as are mala in se (wrong in essence) and that part which deals with such offenses as are mala in prohibita (wrong by the prohibition of society) only. Such offenses as are mala in se are against the law of nature, dictated by God himself and binding in every place and time. Such offenses as are mala in prohibita are reflections of the society of men, as when one country prohibits the hunting of partridges and another the hunting of hares.

            “Since the reign of John I, the law of England has divided the responsibility for what is law between the municipal courts and the courts of the Anglican Church. The municipal courts consider such offenses as are mala in prohibita, while the courts of the Church consider such as are mala in se…”

            (William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England)

#

            “He will dine at Chez Pellier on this Thursday night. It will be a personal appointment with a man he believes to be an influential lobbyist.” Brother Dominic had said that the Order had many agents. “There is a private jet ready to take you to Washington.”

            “What if … what if he doesn’t come?”

            Brother Dominic looked at her for a long moment before speaking; Beth thought she saw a terrible sadness behind his eyes.

            “The … appointment … is part of the judgment of the court. If he does not come to the appointment, the judgment is vacated.

            “But in my thirty-eight years in service to the Order, I have never known a man to fail to make his appointment.”

            Beth knelt while Brother Dominic performed the extreme unction. She flew to Washington that night.

#

            “A man of fierce intellect and conscience, Jefferson’s political ambitions were ultimately doomed by his radical view that the colonies should not merely separate from England, but also from the Anglican Church. In a letter to the Danbury Baptists of Connecticut, Jefferson wrote of “building a wall of separation between Church and State” and “abolishing the legal powers of the Gladium Angeli in their starry chambers”.

            “When the Danbury letter became public, Jefferson’s statement of conscience was quickly appropriated by his long-time political rival, Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton battered Jefferson with accusations of atheism and sedition, and goaded Aaron Burr into challenging Jefferson to the tragic duel that cost Burr his life…”

            (Ron Chernow, Thomas Jefferson)

#

            Beth watched the protestors in front of the National Cathedral—a ragtag group of Jeffersonians waving placards and chanting “Build the Wall!” They were mannerly, at least, however misguided. When Beth approached the front steps, they parted respectfully to let her enter.

            She did not even need to show them the angel.

            She stayed on the twelfth floor of the Ambassador Hotel that night, looking down at the trees in Franklin Square. She wore the silver angel around her neck now, heavy and unmistakable, its sword stretched out in judgment. It was the mark of her vocation and one of the most powerful signs in the Commonwealth. Tomorrow it would open any door that Beth needed.

            Tonight she touched the pendant tenderly and spoke the Angel’s Creed again. “I believe in the one God, a God of justice and of mercy. I believe in His angel and in the sword I wield. With this sword I bring God’s justice and His mercy, and so I do sacrifice and consecrate my own life to God.”

#

            Beth opened her coat to reveal the angel and watched every expression, every trace of emotion recede from the maître d’s face. He took a step backward from the desk and held his arm out, palm up. She walked slowly into the white tablecloths and the light chatter. Silence spread like ink wherever the diners caught sight of her.

            She spotted her man.

            He chewed his steak and laughed at some remark. She came up behind him and, softly, spoke his name.

            He half turned, not really paying attention. “Who let this bitch in here?”

            “Not a bitch,” said Beth, smiling serenely and lifting her index finger. “An angel.”

~

Bio:

Nicholas Diehl was born in Detroit, attended Michigan State University (B.A. in mathematics and history) and UC Davis (Ph.D. in philosophy), and teaches philosophy at Sacramento City College. He has published essays on narration, satire, and the relationship of narrative to philosophical practice in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and fiction in Daily Science Fiction and MetaStellar. An extremely photogenic corgi lives in his house.

Philosophy Note:

This story is about the relationship of church and state, and how the American legal system might be very different if there were no Establishment Clause in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. My aim is to make that possible world both appealing and unsettling in equal degrees–provoking readers to think about the possibility (and of course, about our own reality) rather than arguing for a position.
I teach a course called ‘Law, Justice, and Punishment’ at Sacramento City College, and my wonderful students and colleagues there have surely given this story a helping hand through our discussions over the years.

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From The Desk Of J.G. Faust

by A. J. Rocca

Wittenberg University
Universitätsplatz 10
Halle, Germany 06108

6 March 2020

Mr. William Z. Beuv
Head of Transactional Services
Ad Bestias, Inc.
01 Judecca
9th circle, Hell 61616

Dear Mr. Beuv,

I am writing to lodge a formal complaint against one of your associates, a Mr. John Mephisto. Mr. Mephisto has been your company’s representative to me for some fifty-two years now, and I must express some dissatisfaction with services rendered as of late. I have postponed sending this letter in hopes that Mr. Mephisto would resolve whatever trouble it is that’s been plaguing his quality of work, but his continued negligence has finally run out the last of my patience. Mr. Mephisto has roundly failed in his duties as my temptation consultant, and I must request his immediate transfer and replacement.

What leaves me so profoundly frustrated is that for the first forty or so years of his tenure, Mr. Mephisto had approached his work with admirable gusto. I can still remember his voice in my ear back when I was a hungry child roaming the market. He would pull my attention to the stalls just spilling over with juicy red apples and then helpfully note all the most expedient escape routes should I avail myself of one. Then as a youth, whenever my gaze chanced upon an attractive woman, Mr. Mephisto could always be counted upon to provide comprehensive and speedy analysis of her assets along with multiple proposals for a personal merger. True, Mr. Mephisto’s consul from these early days was not terribly sophisticated, but he more than made up for that through his sheer intensity, his passion, his fire! Mr. Mephisto’s whispers could burnish the sheen on an apple, the bloom on a cheek, until they shined red hot and practically burned to look at.

As I grew into a man, that fire only spread. I became the renowned scholar I am today because Mr. Mephisto made me hungry not just for apples, but for knowledge. I burned through book after book in lusty frenzy because Mr. Mephisto showed me that while there are many beautiful women, it is Sophia who is most desirable of all. Mr. Mephisto made me ravenous for life and all of life’s pleasures, so ravenous it frightened me. Indeed, I even pursued a degree in divinity (in addition to the others) and went to mass nearly every day just to keep Mr. Mephisto and the hungers he inspired in check. I used to be a quite decent tenor once upon a time, and I remember the hymns I used to sing to drown out Mr. Mephisto’s voice. My passion made me stand against the rest of the congregation as a pearl on the sand.

In the past few years however, I have observed Mr. Mephisto’s fire slowly lose its intensity until now it has all but fizzled out. No longer do I hear that insidious hiss in my ear pushing me to take, to consume, to make mine no matter the cost. Instead I hear some listless, faraway murmur suggesting something like “You can order the T-bone if you want. You’ve been so good on your cholesterol this week,” and that’s if I’m lucky. Most days I don’t hear him at all, and without Mr. Mephisto’s demonic injunctions pressing on me, all the things I once loved and lived for have lost their appeal. I never notice the apples in the market anymore, I can’t remember the last time I turned a second glance at a woman. And my books, my beloved books, they only bore me now. The fruit of knowledge—argument, schema, and paradigm which I once took such delight in mastering—are now only words to me, strokes of ink on a page, empty breath without even the breath.

I never really appreciated the importance of your company and its services until I found myself deprived of them. There is simply no life in the business of life without a little hellfire there to heat it. Without that, I don’t see the point in doing much of anything anymore. I don’t even go to mass now save for on Christmas and Easter; what’s the point in going to church and singing psalms anymore when I can just as easily drown out Mr. Mephisto’s scant few murmurs by getting a drink and turning up the TV? I can think of no reason. Please, Mr. Beuv, send me someone who will make me want to sing again.

Respectfully yours,

Johann G. Faust, Ph.D., M.D., J.D., Th.D.
Chair of Philosophy & Religious Studies, Wittenberg University
+49 345 55 21589
jgfaust.us@wittenberg.de

#

Ad Bestias, Inc.
01 Judecca
9th circle, Hell 61616

10 March 2020

Dr. John G. Faust
Chair of Philosophy & Religious Studies
Wittenberg University
Universitätsplatz 10
Halle, Germany 06108

Dr. Faust,

You have all my sympathies and deepest regrets, sir. If we had a nighttime down here, it is letters like these which would keep me up through it, I do not doubt.

First, I must speak a word in defense of Mr. Mephisto. Mr. Mephisto is one of our finest employees with a special talent for temptation, a talent to which your early years with him can attest. It has been a mark of pride for this organization that for centuries we have been able to provide the services of him and those like him on a pro bono basis to individuals such as yourself. Unfortunately, the demand for evil in the world is higher today than has ever been before, and we have only so many demons in hell to meet that demand. Mr. Mephisto’s diminishing quality of work is not because of any negligence or defect on his part, but simply because his efforts are spread amongst so many thousands of clients all queuing for his attention. Providing that individual level of care you cited in our charitable work is simply no longer feasible, economically speaking.

However, my good doctor, we do offer another option for distinguished individuals such as yourself. It is possible for you to privately contract the services of Mr. Mephisto for a set duration during which time you will be his sole priority. Not only would you be provided with basic temptation consul, but also a number of chthonic perks to help in pursuing said temptations. Please note that this is a paid service, and the costs for privately hiring one of our consultants tend to run rather steeply. I can guarantee you though that if you sign up, you’ll be getting plenty of that fire you asked for.

Tell us if you’re interested and we can have one of our lawyers begin drafting up a contract posthaste.

Respectfully my own,

William Z. Beuv
Head of Transactional Services, Ad Bestias, Inc.
(024) 411-9198
bzbeuv@adbstias.com.he

~

Bio:

A.J Rocca is a writer and a graduate student in English at Western Illinois University. He writes short stories and critical essays, and occasionally creates videos for his YouTube channel, BlueMorningStar. His work has been published at Every Day Fiction and Short Edition.

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